Sunday, October 10, 2010

Wow. Here we are, still reeling from the Marc Hauser scandal, and thinking about the implications for other scholarship that built on his work. And now comes something bigger, way bigger in the academic world. According to the best print news outlet in these United States, a group of historians have admitted that they "entirely fabricated" ancient Greece.

Sure, they were trying to "advance their careers", but:

"One night someone made a joke about just taking all these ideas, lumping them together, and saying the Greeks had done it all 2,000 years ago," Haddlebury said. "One thing led to another, and before you know it, we're coming up with everything from the golden ratio to the Iliad."

"That was a bitch to write, by the way," he continued, referring to the epic poem believed to have laid the foundation for the Western literary tradition. "But it seemed to catch on."

I'm shattered. And bracing for the proverbial other shoe:

"It would be a shame to see humanity abandon achievements such as heliocentrism and the plays of Aeschylus just because of their origin," the statement read in part. "Moreover, we have some rather disappointing things to tell you about the pyramids, the works of Leonardo da Vinci, penicillin, the Internet, the scientific method, movies, and dogs."